AP Family Trees

Keep your family history on your own WordPress site – self-hosted, with your data in your own database rather than locked inside a third-party genealogy platform. AP Family Trees is a versatile genealogy plugin built for family historians, authors, publishers and institutions who want to publish genealogical research on their WordPress websites. Import from GEDCOM, display interactive charts, and give every ancestor their own profile page. Insert family member profile ‘cards’ into other blog content to create lovely ‘pull outs’ linking to profile pages. The plugin includes multiple ways to access and display family history content and links on your site so you can integrate your genealogical information seamlessly – whether as a full-page family tree chart or a small profile linking box on longer text articles.

Built by AncestorPress – tools for family history, built to last.

What You Can Do With the Free Version

• Import GEDCOM files from any genealogy application (Family Tree Maker, Gramps, MacFamilyTree, Ancestry, and all standard GEDCOM 5.5 exporters)
• Export your data as GEDCOM – take your complete lineage back to any genealogy application at any time, at full fidelity (people, families, events, relationships, notes, and source citations). Your data is never locked in
• Display a Descendant Vertical chart – the classic top-down family tree, pan and zoom enabled
• Unlimited family members in a single lineage
• Living person privacy controls – living people are auto-detected and their details hidden on the front end (configurable; GEDCOM flags and manual marking are also honoured)
• Configurable chart boxes – show or hide photos, dates, spouses, and gender indicators; set name and date formats
• Gender colour indicators – customisable male/female colours in chart boxes
• Click any person to re-root the chart – visitors can make any ancestor or descendant the new starting point
• Embed on any page via shortcode or Gutenberg block

Pro

Unlock the full publishing toolkit:

• Unlimited lineages – manage separate family histories or multiple GEDCOM files side by side
• Ancestor Horizontal chart – the industry-standard pedigree view, left to right
• Full profile pages for every person – photo, dates, relationships, notes, and custom fields, embeddable via shortcode or block
• Compact profile cards – inline photo, name, and dates card embeddable in any post or page
• Photo gallery on profiles
• GEDCOM notes displayed on profile pages
• Custom fields – unlimited per lineage (text, date, URL, select)
• Member search via shortcode or Gutenberg block
• Person box links to profile page – click a name in the chart to open their full profile
• Chart edit controls – add and remove people directly from the chart
• Generations control – floating panel lets visitors adjust how many generations are shown

Pro Plus

The complete set, including every chart type and export format:

Everything in Pro, plus:

• Descendant Horizontal chart
• Ancestor Vertical chart – youngest at the bottom, ancestors ascending
• Descendant Compact Text chart
• Hourglass chart – ancestors and descendants of one person in a single view; ancestors branch left, the person is in the centre, descendants branch right
• Custom chart colours – full control over boxes, borders, connectors, name text, and date text
• PDF export – print or save the chart directly from the viewer
• SVG export – download as a scalable vector file for print or design use
• Member directory – sortable by surname, first name, or birth date

All plans use the same plugin. Upgrade at any time by entering a licence key – no reinstall required. Multi-site licensing available on request.

Who It Is For

AP Family Trees is designed for:

• Family history researchers who want to publish their tree online as part of a WordPress site or blog
• Genealogy societies and archives that need to present lineage data in a structured, professional format
• Historians and heritage organisations building public-facing ancestor resources
• Anyone who has been using desktop genealogy software and wants to move their data onto their own website

What Makes It Different

Most genealogy plugins are either too simple (a basic chart widget with no data management) or too complex (requiring server configuration and database imports). AP Family Trees sits in the middle: a proper data-driven plugin that stores your family data cleanly in WordPress, imports from the standard GEDCOM format used by every major genealogy application, and renders interactive, publication-quality charts and profile pages.

Your data stays on your server, stored in your own WordPress database – not uploaded to an external genealogy platform or locked behind someone else’s service.

More from AncestorPress

AP Family Trees is one of a small family of AncestorPress tools for publishing family history research. Each works on its own, and all are free on WordPress.org:

• AP Family Archive – publish your family history as a complete website: a person page for every ancestor, family group pages, a surname index and full search, with living people protected automatically. Shares its data core with Family Trees – the same people appear in both with no re-import.
• AP Family Research – the private workbench behind the published tree: capture certificates, photos and notes as artefacts, work your research questions, and log every search, including the ones that found nothing. Nothing it holds is ever published; a proven conclusion is promoted into the same shared data core with its citations attached, so it appears in your Family Trees charts.
• AP One-Name Studies – give a one-name study a home on your own site: surname variants and deviants, a searchable occurrence index, and historic-county distribution maps.
• AP One-Place Studies – give a one-place study a home on your own site: the records of a parish, village, street or house as a searchable occurrence index, place and household pages, and full export.

Third-party libraries

This plugin bundles the following open-source libraries. All are GPL-compatible.

• php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson – MIT licence. Used for parsing GEDCOM files on import.
• Panzoom by Andrei Kashcha – MIT licence. Used for interactive pan and zoom on family tree charts.
• Select2 by Kevin Brown, Igor Vaynberg, and contributors – MIT licence. Used for searchable dropdowns in the admin interface.
• Freemius WordPress SDK by Freemius – GPLv3. Used for licence management on Pro and Pro Plus plans.

Privacy and data

All family tree data is stored exclusively in your own WordPress database. The plugin never transmits your family history data: no person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, and neither does the name of any tree.

Two optional services can send other, non-genealogical information, and only when you choose to use them: the Freemius SDK, if you connect an account or activate a paid licence, and the AncestorPress Support Service, if you open the support assistant and accept its privacy notice. Both are described in full in the External services section below, including exactly what is sent and what is never sent.

External services

1. Freemius (licensing, checkout and optional diagnostics)

AP Family Trees uses the Freemius SDK, from Freemius, Inc., for optional account connection, licence administration, checkout for the Pro and Pro Plus plans, and optional usage diagnostics.

When data may be transmitted: when you opt in to the activation flow, connect or manage an account or licence, use checkout, or consent to optional usage diagnostics.

What may be transmitted: broad account and installation information such as the site URL, the administrator email address you provide, plugin and WordPress version data, and licence identifiers. Opting in to the activation flow is optional – you can skip it and every free feature keeps working.

Your family history data is never sent to Freemius. No person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, and neither does the name of any tree.

Terms of service: https://freemius.com/terms/
Privacy policy: https://freemius.com/privacy/

2. AncestorPress Support Service

Purpose: the optional Help assistant, the AncestorPress Support Copilot, answers questions about using the plugin. Where an AI provider is connected in WordPress (Settings > Connectors), that provider answers first, at your own cost, and the AncestorPress Support Service, provided by Black and White Trading Ltd, supplies the matching documentation; if that provider cannot answer and the site is connected to the service, the assistant automatically falls back to the service. Where none is connected, the service answers a few questions a month itself, free. The assistant is read-only.

When: nothing is sent until an administrator opens the assistant and accepts its privacy notice. The acceptance is recorded with who gave it and when, and can be withdrawn on the Support screen.

Answered by your own AI provider: your question and chat history go only to that provider. The service is asked only for documentation, and receives the site address, the plugin and its version, the admin screen, and any Freemius installation ID or support token – never your question.

Answered by the service (no AI provider connected, or your AI provider’s answer failed – in either case only when the site is connected through the Freemius opt-in or a support token on the Support screen): the question and up to 20 recent chat messages; the site address and any Freemius installation ID or support token, to authorise the request; this plugin’s version, the versions of other active plugins whose folders begin “ap-” or “ancp-“, the admin screen, and how many trees, people, families and charts exist, whether a profile page is set, and your thumbnail, privacy-default and living-person cutoff settings – never their contents. Your family history data is never sent: no person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, and neither does the name of any tree. The free plan answers a limited number of questions a month.

Tickets: with a licence or support token, only when you open the ticket form and click “Create ticket” does the plugin also send the conversation, the details above, the question category, the contact email you enter (pre-filled with your WordPress account email) and the first and last name from your WordPress profile; these are kept as a support ticket. On the free plan no ticket form is offered, so none of this is sent, and help from a person is on the WordPress.org support forum.

Retention: questions are not stored, and the conversation stays in your browser until you leave the page. Authorisation checks are cached for up to 12 hours; rate-limit and free-plan counters are kept against a hash of your host name (monthly counts for about 40 days); daily usage counters with no site identifier are kept for up to 180 days. Please do not paste details of living people into a question.

Terms: https://ancestorpress.com/terms/
Privacy: https://ancestorpress.com/privacy-policy/